could you imagine as margaret dumont endures insult after insult by groucho and acts shocked and offended she’s actually internally coming up with a ton of witty comebacks that’d put him right in his place i love this headcanon
Stan writes about his first meeting with Fred Karno in a letter to Fred Karno Jr. (x)
Apparently, the letter Stan had with him was from his dad, Arthur Jefferson, who was in the theatre business. Which might explain why Stan was hired despite not knowing what “taking the nap” meant. Also, Fred Sr. wasn’t being overly flirty with Stan; only testing what his reaction to a fake punch would be.
My film professor claimed all silent films were shot “flat” and “were basically filmed stage plays.” Not just early stuff, but even ones from the 1920s.
I love the guy but… no. That is like the broadest generalization ever. And a wrong one considering many silent films from the 1920s were the apex of that medium’s art, telling stories that felt like cinema and not theater’s red-headed step-child. I resent the idea that silent films were all primitive shit before we got to “Real movies” in the 1930s and 1940s.
Buster Keaton, for instance, protested to the end of his days that he had no notion of what his admirers were talking about when they spoke, as Andrew Sarris did, of his “cerebral” qualities, or when they detected a pervasive surrealism in his films that – considering the period in which the films were made – virtually placed him in the avant-garde. "I was just trying to get laughs" was his constant and stubborn answer to questions. Keaton was, in fact, a brilliant analyst of film, as his dazzling film-within-a-film in Sherlock Jr. indicates: the sequence illustrates basic theories of continuity and cutting more vividly and with greater precision than theorists themselves have ever been able to do. But the analysis is not in Keaton’s head. It is in the film. He went past cerebration and worked only with the thing itself, creating what amounts to theory out of his body, his camera, his fingers, a pair of scissors. Art is often something done before it is something thought: Keaton’s impulses were not only stronger but more accurate than any verbal formulation he might have chosen to offer for them.
– Walter Kerr on film artist Buster Keaton, The Silent Clowns, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1975, p. 98
Migratory Cocoanuts 